Glencore
has started advertising for new workers at its controversially mothballed Collinsville mine in Queensland in a move that will doubtless reignite tension with the coal unions over the process that has left 245 members without jobs.

The miner intends to open interviews with applicants over the next months with the aim of getting workers on site early in the new year.

It is not clear how many jobs will be offered or how long it might take for Glencore to give the greenlight to production at the mine.

What is very certain though is that the new Collinsville workers will be employed under terms and conditions quite unlike those that previously shaped the work practices at the mine.

Glencore shut Collinsville on September 1 after the failure of a near year-long attempt to draw up a new enterprise agreement aimed at introducing flexible manning that would allow the efficient deployment of a new fleet of higher volume excavators, loaders and trucks.

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Discussions over a new deal for Collinsville were punctuated by Glencore’s decision to recover direct management of an operation that had, for 17 years, been run by contract miner Thiess.

In February Glencore (nee Xstrata Coal and GlencoreXstrata) said it would not renew the Thiess contract and it would instead operate the mine directly on behalf of its partners Itochu and Sumitomo.

It did this because the mine has run at loss of double-digit millions for the past 18 months. But the by-product of internalising mine management is that Glencore has effectively given itself the opportunity to force a redesign of work practices.

To no one’s surprise, the CFMEU resisted any change to the existing Thiess agreement and argued that Glencore was abusing the intent of the transfer of business rules in the Fair Work Act.

Approval for the change employment arrangements is required by the Fair Work Commission and it is more usual under circumstances such as a change of ownership of the managing entity where the workforce and their existing agreements are transferred with the asset.

Collinsville has capacity and resource enough to produce 6 million tonnes a year. Through the last year of its management by Thiess, its employed about 400 miners who produced 2.65 million tonnes of thermal coal and 750,000 tonnes of more valuable metallurgical product.

And, as we have noted before, when push comes to shovel, that is not enough to sustain the operation.

So, Glencore is to deploy bigger and more efficient equipment at the site. And to help make that equipment more productive, it needs to settle on terms and conditions of employment.

Glencore, for example, asked the union to end restrictions that prevent operators from driving different classifications of equipment through any designated shift. As things stood, jobs were allocated over single or groups of shifts, meaning discrete or routine multi-tasking was not indulged under the agreement.

From February on, Glencore told the union that it could not afford to run Collinsville at a loss, that it would not run the mine under the Thiess EA and that it would shut the mine rather than re-employ workers under existing rules.

Nonetheless, when Glencore made good on its commitment to shut the gates, the CFMEU directed all sorts of colourful, if predictable,outrage on the global mining giant.

“This is not the behaviour of a modern Australian employer," the CFMEU said, “this is extremely combative behaviour from a company that is used to operating in countries where employees don’t have rights or a choice for bargaining representation."

Since then conversations between union and miner, some of which have been conducted under the oversight of the FWC, have proved as unproductive as they were before the closure of the 100-year-old operation.

The reaction of both unions and former Collinsville employees to the company’s move to start hiring new staff will be closely watched by the whole industry.

Glencore has waited until now to start hiring because the workplace rules mean that it had to wait three months before it could hire the workers made redundant under the shift of management.

What this says is that Glencore is either very confident that it can recover the best of the workers that were forced out by perceived union intransigence or that waiting was the most productive way of managing the public affairs issues that will flow from a move to bypass a union-backed agreement in re-populating Collinsville.

Elsewhere on the industrial relations front, we are keeping a weather eye on the CFMEU’s move to conduct a strike ballot at Glencore Liddell colliery in the Hunter Valley and on the circling of
Arrium
’s steel making and processing arms by a troika of unions led by the Australian Workers Union.

Arrium says the move to ballot workers across four fronts of its steel business is part of the routine of commercial life. But others are not so sure about this.

Mind you, the only obviously problematic issue I can see with Arrium’s pitch for its next two-year steel workers’ agreement is the structure of its annual pay rises.

Arrium has agreed to pay annual 3 per cent rises but, given the straightened circumstances of the steel industry, it is asking that those rises be received in chunks of 1.5 per cent at six-month intervals through the life of the agreement.

Newcrest’s collision with proxy advisory continues, with ISS principal Ulysses Chioatto citing the goldminer as an example of the problems created by chairmen who draw boards from gene pools that are too small and too familiar.

Chairman Don Mercer’s crisis management and external communication is similarly cited by Chioatto as a “what not to do case study".

Despite attempting to open dialogue with Newcrest in early June, ISS eventually went to market with its recommendation that shareholders vote down three directors of long-standing before Chioatto was able to actually sit down with the chairman.

Chioatto says that “the majority" of ASX 300 chairmen and their remuneration committees would routinely open dialogue with the proxy advisors “as early as April and maybe June".

“In many cases we have several face-to-face meetings and then follow-up calls. Both sides get to understand the issues. Newcrest left it until the horse had bolted. We couldn’t get any dialogue happening or get across to them what our issues may have been."

That ISS made initial contact on June 7 is no excuse, according to Chioatto. That was, of course, the day Newcrest announced $6 billion worth of write-downs, delivering itself into an ASIC investigation of allegations of selective briefing of analysts.

“Generally, no matter what is going on, companies will make the time to deal with the proxy advisory community," Chioatto said.

The way he sees things, Newcrest has a particularly international register and sustaining a productive dialogue with the proxy advisories should be one plank in the efficient management of high-level communications with investors.

Chioatto rates his encounter with Mercer on the back of last week’s board and executive changes as an example of “too little, too late".

And, just generally, the ISS boss reckons that succession planning across the ASX 300 is failing to refresh the DNA of local boards.

“As the British life peer Lord Boothby put it: ‘If you have five directorships it is total heaven, like having a nice warm bath’," Chioatto said. “Some still see it that way."

There are pathways to ending this dependence on the familiar, according to Chioatto.

One suggestion is a more routine use of alternate directors to introduce a broader base to the specific disciplines of the boardroom and another the embrace of the European-style advisory boards as a way of seeding the future recruits drawn from professional paths beyond the legal and accounting communities that so dominate our boardroom landscape.